Michael Dibdin, 60, Detective Novelist, Is Dead - The New York Times The New York Times Books |Michael Dibdin, 60, Detective Novelist, Is Dead Search Michael Dibdin, an internationally acclaimed British crime novelist whose best-known books feature the brooding Italian police detective Aurelio Zen, died on March 30 in Seattle. He was 60 and had lived in Seattle in recent years. Mr. Dibdin died after a short illness, his stepdaughter, Emma Marris, said. Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen starred in 10 novels, among them “Ratking” (Bantam, 1989); “Dead Lagoon” (Pantheon, 1994); “Medusa” (Pantheon, 2003); and, most recently, “Back to Bologna” (Vintage, 2006). Mr. Dibdin’s 11th Zen novel, “End Games,” is scheduled to be published in hardcover by Pantheon Books this fall.

Each Aurelio Zen novel took its hero to a different part of Italy, from Zen’s native Venice to Rome, Milan, Naples, Perugia, Tuscany, Sicily, Sardinia and elsewhere. The books were notable for their intricate plots, psychological complexity, mordant humor and acute social observation. Above all, the novels were read avidly for Mr. Dibdin’s masterly distillation of Italy, whether he was writing about its politics (read: corruption), the church, the Mafia, fashion, truffles, wine or old stones. Where else, after all (with the possible exception of France), would a detective witness a cook-off between a celebrity chef and a semiotician, something Zen does in “Back to Bologna”? Advertisement Continue reading the main story Reviewing “Blood Rain” (Pantheon, 1999), the seventh installment in the Zen series, in The New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio wrote: “Dibdin has always been a master at adapting his style to the various Italian provinces where he sets his stories. In Piedmont, his voice was elegiac; in Venice, menacing; in Rome, cynical and sad.

Sicily, where life is lived as ‘ritual theater,’ brings out the Greek tragedian in him.” What makes Zen a likable character is his unlikability. He is gloomy and cynical. He can be dour and dyspeptic. He has trouble sustaining intimate relationships. (In the first few novels, he lived with his mother.) Photo Michael Dibdin in 1991. Credit Camera Press Mr. Dibdin also wrote several stand-alone crime novels, among them “The Tryst” (Summit, 1990); “Dirty Tricks” (Summit, 1991); “The Dying of the Light” (Pantheon, 1993); and “Thanksgiving” (Pantheon, 2001). Michael John Dibdin was born on March 21, 1947, in Wolverhampton, in the Staffordshire district of England. His father was a physicist turned folklorist, and the family spent years wandering Britain so that the elder Mr. Dibdin could collect folk songs. At 7, Michael put his foot down, and the family stayed where they were, which happened to be Lisburn, Northern Ireland.

After earning an undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Sussex in 1968, Mr. Dibdin earned a master’s degree from the University of Alberta, in Canada, the next year. He stayed in Canada for several more years, working as a house painter, before moving to London. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy He later relocated to Italy, where he spent four years teaching English in Perugia. Returning to England, Mr. Dibdin settled in Oxford, where he lived before moving to the United States in the mid-1990s. Mr. Dibdin’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Kathrine Kristine Beck, who writes crime novels under the name K. K.

Beck; his father, John, of Chichester, England; two daughters from his earlier marriages, Moselle Kennedy of Vancouver, Canada, and Emma Dibdin, a student at Cambridge University; and three stepchildren, Emma Marris of Washington; Andrew Marris of Seattle; and Alexander Marris, a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Drawing on his scholarly training and his Italian sojourn, Mr. Dibdin began his career with two literary pastiches. In the first, “The Last Sherlock Holmes Story” (Pantheon, 1978), Holmes takes on Jack the Ripper. In the second, “A Rich Full Death” (Vintage, 1999), Robert Browning investigates a death in Florence. While critics heaped praise on the Mr. Dibdin’s Zen novels, their response to his other books varied. To some reviewers, the scope of the non-Zen books — which ranged from an exploration of the relationship between a psychiatrist and her patient (“The Tryst”) to a dark satire of Thatcherite Britain (“Dirty Tricks”) to a sendup of English country-house mysteries (“The Dying of the Light”) — made Mr.

Dibdin hard to pigeonhole. If his wide portfolio made him unclassifiable, Mr. Dibdin seemed to revel in the fact. As he wrote in an autobiographical essay for The St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (1996), his diversity of style “seems to have disturbed those readers who expect a crime writer’s output to be as consistent a product as Egg McMuffins.” He added: “To me the joy and challenge of working in the crime genre is the opportunity to weave one’s own counterpoint and harmonies — occasionally dissonant to some ears — around the great chorus of voices which have preceded us; to make the most rather than the least of the possibilities which they opened up.” A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C9 of the New York edition with the headline: Michael Dibdin, 60, Detective Novelist. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Review: Medusa by Michael Dibdin | Books | The Guardian by Michael Dibdin Faber, £6.99 Yes, a thriller. Or a detective story, if that sounds more dignified.

This column does not write about the genre on the grounds that it has not read one since 1987, and that there is a far more experienced critic of this type of book elsewhere in these pages. But Dibdin writes the kind of policiers that get reviewed in the TLS, and the latest one had just dropped through the letterbox, and I was going on holiday, and this is the kind of thing you're meant to read on holiday... I now begin to understand the attraction. Like a pensioner discovering crack cocaine and liking it, I wonder at the wasted years I have spent not reading thrillers. I could have been having so much more fun. The books I tend to read and approve of do not have quite so many dead bodies, nail-biting chases, sinister conspiracies, or world-weary exposés of the cynical corruption at the heart of the body politic. All these, Dibdin has.

I had already, through skimming the reviews, learned that he had a hero called Aurelio Zen, a Venetian detective who is, in his quiet way, a bit of an epicure (fussy about his food and fags, likes a spot of grappa), something of a lone wolf, wholly moral, but not above annoying his superiors or bending the rules to achieve results. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean. From what I recall of the genre, this applies, mutatis mutandis, to every detective since Sherlock Holmes. One wonders if there is a market for stories about cheerful, gregarious detectives with happy home lives who eat and drink any old crap and do everything by the book. So Zen may be a cliché - but he's a very refined version of one. Dibdin has been both clever and brave to make him not just Italian but Venetian - he has to negotiate the fantastically complex networks of corruption and regional and political rivalry that make up the central nervous system of Italy. Moreover, Italy has conspiracies the way dogs have fleas, so the idea of a moral Italian policeman is almost funny - and Dibdin knows this.

Recent developments make the comedy both richer and darker. At one point, asking whether an old pal isn't doing something illegal, Zen receives a reply giving concise details of Silvio Berlusconi's breathtaking response to the crimes he has been accused of. (Basically, making them no longer crimes.) "And you're asking me if what I'm doing is illegal?" Medusa begins with the discovery of a body in an abandoned military tunnel - only it has been lying there for 30 years or so. Pretty soon people are being bumped off in sinister fashions, and Zen starts poking his nose in and annoying people at the highest level. At which point I realise that not only does the plot summary sound unavoidably like a string of non-surprises, it does a disservice to the book as well as spoiling the pleasure of finding out for yourself what happens next. Further research into Dibdin's Zen - I asked Faber to send me the rest, and have now inhaled five of them - indicates that the books are, basically, like going on holiday in Italy but without being bitten by mosquitoes, while at the same time learning about the seamy side of Italian politics and institutions.

Not that there is any other side, it seems, even if sometimes the corruption or conspiracy happens by sheer accident. Zen travels all over the place, allowing him to annoy superiors in a variety of atmospheric locations. The ultimate punishment, it would appear, is a posting to Sicily. In Medusa he is at the other end of the country, in the Alto Adige, the mountainous region next to Austria, inhabited by resentful Germanophones. But this is really a sideline to the book's real interest: the fallout from the battles between the military and the Italian left in the 60s. Even without the murder element, it is a useful look at history, and so knowledgeable that you could be fooled for thinking it had been expertly translated from the Italian. I suspect that this is a deliberate policy. I wonder: how well does Zen go down in Italy? Venetian Delights: On The Case In Italy With Aurelio Zen - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Venetian Delights: On The Case In Italy With Aurelio Zen January 01, 1995|By Dick Adler. Special to the Tribune.

The best mystery of the month is about an Italian policeman and is written by a British author currently living in Seattle. Remember the name: Michael Dibdin. His last novel, "The Dying of the Light," set in a seedy retirement home in the English countryside, was a delight-a deceptively genial sendup of the form. Now, in Dead Lagoon (Pantheon, $21), Dibdin brings his ironic investigator Aurelio Zen (star of "Ratking," "Vendetta" and "Cabal") back to his Venetian roots for a book that glistens with sadness and crackles with energy. Zen's temporary return to Venice from Rome is a private affair: He's using his vacation time to earn some extra money by poking into the disappearance of a wealthy American. Since his family home sits damp, empty and unrentable, Zen camps out there-which brings back a flood of memories and connections. There is an old contessa tormented by household ghosts; a boyhood friend neck-deep in a dangerous political movement; even a Hamlet-like wraith with a revelation about Zen's own family history.

Dibdin's descriptions of daily life in the non-tourist sections of Venice in winter are instantly evocative, deepening our interest in the narrative without slowing it down for a second. The same can be said of his mordant observations about current Italian politics and police work. "Dead Lagoon" is rich and complex, the kind of mystery novel that enriches the form and justifies all those hours we spend reading books we hope will be like it. Ruth Rendell must have taken an Alaskan cruise in the last couple of years. In No Night Is Too Long (Harmony/Crown, $23), the latest product from her Barbara Vine subsidiary, Rendell draws on that trip with somewhat less ingenuity and panache than she used when she sent Inspector Wexford to China. But second-level Rendell/Vine is still several notches higher than most other mystery writers on the planet, and this one has its moments. "No Night Is Too Long" takes its title from a literal translation of a line from "Der Rosenkavalier," which becomes both the theme song and ironic death knell of a love affair between a young would-be writer named Tim Cornish and Dr.

Ivo Steadman, an older, more worldly scientist. Tim is not so much devoutly homosexual as needy and passive; on a cruise to-guess where-he soon tires of Ivo and in Juneau takes up with a mysterious woman called Isabel. Rejection brings on anger and violence; Tim flees back to his hometown and a job (marvelously detailed) writing publicity for an endless series of music festivals, waiting for the inevitable policeman's hand on his shoulder. In typical Rendell fashion, it never comes: What happens instead is a mixture of malevolence and coincidence that only occasionally crosses the line into doubt and disbelief. The Seventh Enemy, by William G. Tapply (Otto Penzler, $21), brings back that excellent Boston lawyer and outdoorsman Brady Coyne, who would rather be out in the boonies fishing for trout or solving crimes than rewriting a rich client's will any day. The topic here is gun control-specifically support for a ban on assault weapons that puts both Coyne and his friend Wally Kinnick on the enemies list of a group called SAFE, "Second Amendment For Ever." Kinnick, popular host of a syndicated television show, becomes SAFE's Public Enemy No.

1 and wins several bullets in his body as his award. Coyne makes the list in seventh place, and has to find the shooter before the other contenders are eliminated. Meaty fun-though you'll probably be able to spot the shooter before Coyne does. Bracketed by Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder and "NYPD Blue's" Sipowicz, it takes a perverse courage to write about an alcoholic cop these days. But Thomas Adcock is equal to the challenge, as he proves again in Devil's Heaven (Pocket, $20), his fourth book about New York police detective Neil Hockaday. Events have pressed Hockaday into a six-week stay at a drying-out center. Waiting to see if the cops will take him back, he mooches his way into the investigation of a series of brutal murders involving homosexuals, including a partner in the hotshot publicity agency where Neil's new wife has reluctantly returned to work. The crime scene details might be too specific for some sensibilities, but Adcock is equally unsparing and acute in his descriptions of lunches at the Four Seasons, client meetings and searches for love in tawdry and dangerous gay bars.

Slashback, by Paul Levine (Morrow, $22), is set in Miami-a city you would think needs another detective as much as it needs another hurricane. But Levine's Jake Lassiter, a lawyer who used to be a linebacker for the Dolphins, is a likeable and interesting character who grows on you. There are also some sharply drawn Hawaiian heavies and lots of convincing wind-surfing action. MORE: End Games: An Aurelio Zen Mystery by Michael Dibdin: Pantheon Books, New York 9780375425219 Hardback. Printed pages: 335, 1st Edition. - Tarrington Books Seller & Payment Information Dust jacket: Light shelf wear, slight creasing to edges, unclipped. Overall jacket condition is Very Good Plus. Book: Unread and in fine condition throughout. Overall book condition is Fine. International postage will be less than the stated rate. Actual costs are Europe £6.95; Oceania £11.25; Rest of World £10.40. A postage refund will be made after the order has been placed.

Bookseller Inventory # 1107F112 About this title: Synopsis: The final installment in this award-winning series brings Italian police detective Aurelio Zen to remote Calabria, where the Venice-born-and-bred detective feels uncomfortably like a foreigner. It?s a routine assignment, and Aurelio Zen is biding his time in Calabria while the locals go about their mysterious business. Routine, that is, until an advance scout for an American film company suddenly vanishes. Beneath the surface of a tight-knit traditional community--with secrets and loyalties that go back centuries--violent forces are at work. Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth behind a brutal murder. However, his mission is complicated by another secret that has drawn strangers from the other side of the world on a hunt for buried treasure?a search that has been launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing a bizarre and deadly obsession. It?s a devilishly suspenseful and entertaining adventure that only Aurelio Zen could stumble into--and only Michael Dibdin could serve up.

In End Games, the award-winning author has crafted a suspenseful, action-packed thriller full of unexpected twists and turns--a story that takes us deep into a proud and ancient culture and into the darkest corners of the human heart. Review&colon; If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. This is it -- the final Aurelio Zen novel, now that death has claimed the Italian copperï¿½s talented creator, Michael Dibdin. End Games is a fitting finale to a remarkable series of books, in which Dibdin developed the character of his difficult but tenacious Italian policeman and, inter alia, gave readers a vivid and atmospheric picture of the whole of Italy in all its splendour, colour and corruption. This last book transports Zen to far-flung Calabria for what she appears to be a by-the-numbers assignment. But in this close-mouthed, inhospitable place, Zen discovers that there is a worm at the heart of a community and secrets that reach back over centuries. A savage killing has taken place, and investigations are compromised by the presence of people from other countries in search of a buried treasure.

In the past, Dibdin ensured that Zen repeatedly came up against a wall of silence, but none more implacable than that he encounters here. As the detective slowly but surely peels away the layers of mystery and obfuscation, he is forced to confront the very basis of the concepts by which he has tried to maintain his career: honesty, a sense of justice and firm notions of right and wrong. As always with this writer, the sense of locale is conjured up with maximum vividness, and the final effect of reading the book that writes finis to the careers of both Aurelio Zen and the man who created him is twofold: we are grateful that this final entry is a distinguished one, but saddened that we will never again go down those mean Italian streets that Zen led us down ï¿½ at least not with Michael Dibdin as our guide... --Barry Forshaw "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. Bibliographic Details Book 'em - tribunedigital-chicagotribune From Sicily To Idaho, Baltimore And California With A Varied Selection Of Sleuths April 09, 2000|By Dick Adler.

Dick Adler writes about mysteries for the Tribune, Publishers Weekly and various Internet sites. His first mystery, "The Mozart Code," has been published as an electronic book by Hard Shell Word Factory, and is also available as a Rocket eBook from bn.com. BLOOD RAIN By Michael Dibdin Pantheon, $23 The career of Italian police officer Aurelio Zen has taken more twists than a radiatore pasta, especially since he came close to exposing high-level corruption in the kidnapping of politician Aldo Morro several books ago. Now, in "Blood Rain," the seventh in Michael Dibdin's exquisitely written series, Zen has hit bottom. Even though an influential film producer promised him protection if he solved a famous Piedmontese winemaker's murder in his last outing ("A Long Finish"), Zen has been posted to Sicily, the dead-end job that finishes off so many cops' lives. But, writes Dibdin: "(H)e couldn't really complain. The fact was that he just didn't care any more. Career, love, family, friendships--he'd tried his best in each field, but the results had not been encouraging." The posting isn't even to a relatively safe and civilized part of Sicily like Syracuse.

Instead, Zen has been sent to Catania, a hotbed of Mafia activity, to spy for his Roman bosses in the Interior Ministry on an elite unit known as DIA (Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia) run by the rival Ministry of Defense. He reads supposedly secret reports and pumps DIA colleagues for information--a dirty job in a dirty war with which even the non-criminal public has become fed up. About the only bright spot on Zen's horizon is the presence of his adopted daughter, Carla, in Catania to install a computer network. But even that relationship becomes a source of worry and pain when Carla befriends a tough woman judge marked for death. Dibdin, a Brit who lives in Seattle, slides into the skin of all his Italian characters, making us see the differences between the Venetian-born Zen, his Sicilian friends and enemies, and those he deals with on a trip to Rome to visit his dying mother. He also makes us understand how devious and dangerous politics and policing can be in a country that has had centuries to corrupt those callings.

Along with Donna Leon's series (many not in print in America) about Venice police officer Guido Brunetti, Dibdin's Zen books are essential reading for lovers of mysteries, and of Italy. A TWIST AT THE END By Steven Saylor Simon & Schuster, $25 Steven Saylor's mysteries ("Rubicon" came out in 1999) about Gordianus the Finder, ancient Rome's greatest detective, are full of wit, compassion and immediately accessible period detail. So it should come as no surprise to find all of these qualities in his latest book, which moves back and forth between the New York City of 1906 and the Austin, Texas, of 1885. What is surprising is how much Saylor makes us care for writer William Sydney Porter, better known to the world as O. Henry, whose bittersweet little stories made him the Stephen King of his day. In his youth, Porter fled to Honduras and then spent some time in jail for embezzlement from a bank where he worked, but he was basically such a cold fish that it would seem difficult to work up much sympathy for him.

Saylor pulls it off by making his Will Porter a sideways rather than a direct participant in the book's central crimes--the actual serial murders of black servant girls in the Texas capital. Only when the crimes spread to include a married woman whom Porter coveted does he rouse himself to become involved, and even then his best efforts are outstripped by a reporter friend. It's only 21 years later, as Porter struggles with his New York success, that a mysterious figure arrives to take him back to Austin and give him the chance to correct some old wrongs. This twist at the end works because Saylor is a much more accomplished writer, and probably a better person, than his subject. MURDER AMONG STRANGERS By Jonnie Jacobs Kensington, $20 Jonnie Jacobs' latest mystery begins with one of those scenes -- so popular in fright films -- where the reader is encouraged to stand up and shout: "Don't do it! Don't get out of your car! That's what cellular phones are for!" But if art consultant Kate Austen wasn't a sucker for a bedraggled young blond standing out in the rain next to a disabled car, she wouldn't find the body of the woman's husband in the trunk.

And the nasty boyfriend wouldn't arrive back on the scene and make Kate join the corpse in the trunk on a painful journey to the woods of Idaho, where more murders would occur. And police detective Michael Stone, Austen's live-in lover, wouldn't have to risk his life and career chasing after Austen across several states. Jacobs walks that thin line between the ludicrous and the gripping as well as anyone in the business, giving excellent value for money in terms of chills and puzzles per page. About the only thing a reader can do is pass the popcorn, scrunch up next to that corpse and go along for the ride. DEAD AIR By Rochelle Krich Avon, $23 The mostly sad but occasionally frightening sound of contemporary talk radio sets the tone for Rochelle Krich's latest book about Los Angeles homicide detective Jessie Drake, giving it a believably nasty edge. Last things | Books | The Guardian The Guardian Mark Lawson A strangely prophetic sense of mortality and fragility pervades Michael Dibdin's final work End Games.

Mark Lawson bids farewell to the food-loving, troubled but essentially decent Italian cop, Aurelio Zen, and considers the Anglo-Italian-American author's unique contribution to British detective fiction Saturday 30 June 2007 18.56 EDT First published on Saturday 30 June 2007 18.56 EDT Share on Messenger Close Crime fiction is driven by death, but the guaranteed survival of the detective counters the morbidity of the form. So it's unsettling beyond the usual effects of the genre to read a book by a writer who has recently died. The shadow of mortality and mourning that is a basic requirement of mysteries is doubled in the case of End Games, Michael Dibdin's 11th novel about the Italian cop Aurelio Zen, because the advance copies began to circulate just after the news of the writer's death on March 30, nine days after his 60th birthday. Whatever state Zen is in on the final page of End Games, he has no chance of surviving this book. The tying up of ends in the final chapter will not, for most readers, achieve the catharsis that is one of the reasons such stories have appeal.

The author's sudden absence haunts us far past the last page. Officially, the title of the final Zen book alludes to a plot involving a film company shooting, in Italy, a movie based on the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. As the director explains in a television interview: in "our post-9/11 world, the Book of Revelation touches many exposed cultural nerves. We all know that if terrorists gain access to nuclear or biological weapons, it will quite literally mean the end of the world." Dibdin's end, though, has encouraged the book's name to be taken in a different way. Because of the finality of the title - and the fact that the story begins with the ominously prophetic words "The dead man" - there has been an assumption, reflected in some obituaries, that End Games was consciously a final work, for both Dibdin and Zen. The possibility of the detective's death has been strong since Blood Rain (1999), in which he seemed to have been dispatched by a Mafia car bomb in the final paragraph. Although there were four more books, this hint of the hero's expendability gave Dibdin's creation a sense of fragility that few series characters attain.

Paradoxically, though, End Games is not obviously an acknowledged finale, though there is, for the reader particularly alert to clues, a rather circuitous inclusion of the word "tomb" in a climactic, and otherwise optimistic, paragraph, as well as an odd, brutal reference to a medical condition that seems to have no functional purpose within the book. Otherwise, it is energetically and meticulously written, and the longest novel in the Zen series. There is, perhaps, one other subtle indication of a writer knowingly book-ending his career or, at least, one sequence of novels. In the last paragraph of Ratking, the 1988 story that introduced Aurelio Zen, the detective, walking home, notes that "the sky was clear and littered with stars".

Almost 20 years on, as he enters the final pages of what we now know to be his last case, Zen looks to the heavens and regrets that light pollution has largely obliterated this natural illumination: "[Within] his lifetime that celestial array had been erased like a medieval fresco gaudily overpainted in a more enlightened era." Another possible suggestion of a writer turning to what the Roman Catholic church calls "last things" is that the Italian cop seems more conspicuously interested in religion than before, even more than when, in Cabal (1992), he was actually investigating a mystery within the Vatican. In End Games, he worries about his "sin list", quotes the Latin mass at one witness, then warns her that, if she fails to co-operate, "even the blessed sacraments may not suffice to ensure the salvation of your soul". At another point, Dibdin seems to have got a detail of Catholic theology - the Holy Trinity - wrong, but it turns out that the character, an old lady raised devoutly, has adopted a deliberate and revealing heresy. Underlining this ecclesiastical patterning, the book's recurrent metaphor for Zen is spiritual.

His face is first compared to "the frescoed image of some minor saint who was being martyred". When he enters the interrogation room, a witness notes him as "a handsome man with the appearance of a certain kind of priest ... suggesting a basic bent towards such kindness and indulgence as he might be able to reconcile with the strict rules of his calling". During a second interview, the same witness directly asks whether Zen's mother wanted him "to be a priest rather than a policeman". His spoken reply is that he had "no vocation", but Dibdin then gives him a silent thought that anyone who has followed the character through 11 books is tempted to chisel in the memory as an epitaph: "But I do have a vocation ... it's this stupid, meaningless, utterly compromised job that I try to do as well as I can." Zen's near-contempt for his profession is one of Dibdin's most significant contributions to modern British crime fiction. He took Italy as his location because he had come to love the country and speak the language while teaching at the university of Perugia.

But the decision to set the series outside the UK was perhaps also an acceptance that his home readership would not, at least 20 years ago, accept him being quite so consistently maudlin about the British force. PD James's Dalgleish, Ruth Rendell's Wexford, Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Colin Dexter's Morse all have moments of doubt and self-laceration during investigations, and it has sometimes seemed that resignation might end the career of Ian Rankin's Rebus before retirement does. But, from the very beginning of Ratking, when he seems at risk of being sacked after botching a politically sensitive investigation, Zen encourages the reader to think he has chosen the wrong job. Some of this comes from geographical accuracy: an Italian cop has to deal with a legacy of corruption and dizzily rotating political administrations. Zen's morality is one of the most absorbing areas of the portraits.

Modern fictional cops are maverick almost by default - Rebus and Dalziel delight in ignoring new Home Office guidelines - but Dibdin's detective frequently resorts to illegality: planting or ignoring evidence, suborning witnesses, even, in And Then You Die (2002), committing an act that, if discovered, would merit a life sentence. Yet, when Zen breaks the law, it is because it seems to be the only way of enforcing the law within the Italian system. That the cop is to some extent on the run from what he has previously done, a burden left to the villains in most other crime fiction, significantly shapes his personality. In the later books - especially the penultimate Back to Bologna (2005) - Zen is suffering from disabling depression, an aspect of his personality that even the loosest acquaintance of Dibdin suspected to be autobiographical. But to have described Dibdin's fiction in the previous section as "British", though technically correct, feels uneasy. As a writer who was born in Wolverhampton and educated in Belfast but died in his final adopted home city of Seattle, Dibdin was always hard to pin on a map.

So, in retrospect, it's not surprising that he should have become one of the few novelists who set the majority of their books outside the country of their birth. There are almost 3,000 Italian pages in the Zen sequence, and only two of Dibdin's other seven novels - The Tryst (1989) and Dirty Tricks (1991) - are set in contemporary England. After becoming a "resident alien" in the US to be with the writer KK Beck, his third wife, he soon wrote two novels in a contemporary American voice: Dark Spectre (1995) and Thanksgiving (2000). Fascinated by vocabulary, Dibdin was a magpie of language, and this became reflected in an accent that had already been complicated in childhood by the imposition of Northern Ireland on British black country. The language of End Games properly reflects Dibdin's eclectic lexicon.

The basic storytelling tone is simple, but ominous English: "Mirella and Tom were walking up an inclined alley in the old town when the attack occurred." And, as always in his fiction, the narrative voice enjoys frequent English wordplay: the history of religious cinema is neatly summarised as running from "De Mille to Mel". There's also a risky reference to a computer's "Down's Syndrome software", which reflects the author's intermittent truculence about the polite sensitivities of English society. He once suggested on television that theatres staging Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals should be blown up. Inevitably, though, most of the dialogue in these books has to represent Italian conversation. The early Zens employed the usual compromise of anglophone writers operating overseas - English dialogue with an occasional flavouring of localisms: Questura, Signora. Gradually, Faber & Faber's printers were required to make more and more use of their italic font and, with End Games, the publisher might think about giving away a Berlitz guide as a tie-in.

A key plot-point at the end of one chapter is delivered in untranslated Italian and, within the English dialogue, there is a subtle misunderstanding between a Calabrian and an outsider speaking Italian. The local explains: "An easy mistake for a foreigner. Our verbal forms are very complex." Aptly, this book's idiom also reflects the writer's other adopted country. Symbolically, one character has plans to open a trattoria in Calabria serving US food. And several chapters, which use the viewpoint of an American who has come to Italy as a movie producer scouting locations for the Revelation film, are written in American west coast rhythms: "By the time his modified 737 finally touched down at wherever the fuck it was, Jake felt pretty well bummed." So consistent is the ventriloquism that one of Jake's sentences makes sense only if the letter Z is read to rhyme with "bee", in the stateside way. An Anglo-Italian-American writer, Dibdin is represented in this final book by all three of his dialects. In that sense, the book could not be a more appropriate coda, because his work represents a sort of unification of modern detective fiction.

In the three decades of Dibdin's publishing career, the traditional English crime novel has been refreshed by influence from Europe - especially the novels of Scandinavian writers such as Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum - and America: the dense, violent, sardonic fiction of James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, Robert Parker, George Pelecanos and others. Many younger British writers were guided by these imported styles to make their books darker, funnier and more internationally aware, but only Dibdin went as far as to base his fiction in continental Europe and the US. But, revealingly, even within their chosen foreign country, the Zens were restless. Most fictional sleuths, in line with usual police practice, have a single patch: Edinburgh for Rebus, Oxford for Morse, Brighton for Peter James's Roy Grace. Dibdin's cop, though Venetian by birth, operated nationally rather than locally, seconded to a different Italian region in each book. This had the benefit of providing Dibdin with a new cuisine and dialect each time and giving the central character the permanent status, always useful in a narrative, of an outsider.

It also gave considerable emotional force to the mystery in which Zen worked for the first time among the canals and basilicas of his birthplace: Dead Lagoon (1994). Fittingly, End Games brings him to one of Italy's limits: Calabria, in the toe of what schoolchildren are taught to call the "boot" of the nation's shape on a map. In this distant and institutionally suspicious terrain, an American business traveller has been kidnapped, a crime that, again, perhaps deliberately echoes the missing man set-up in Zen's first Ratking investigation. This last book feels like a summation of Dibdin's feelings about the country he adopted fictionally. The significance of Catholicism in this novel could be explained, apart from any escalating sense of mortality in the author, by a desire to capture every significant aspect of Italy in one storyline. The Fellini-esque movie director, Aldobrandini, who "won the silver at Venice back in the 1960s" and sails around the Adriatic on his yacht, drinking Singapore Slings while preparing to shoot a movie for his American backers, can be taken as a similar attempt at inclusivity.

Culture, religion, politics: the novel is as thorough as a checklist for a visiting diplomat. And, throughout, the writer aphorises about the country with a rueful authority more common in the native. One character is "in the most desperate situation in which any Italian can ever find himself. He was alone." Elsewhere, someone observes: "Italians always seemed to know where they were in space ... Maybe that was why they were so good at art." In the final chapter, the authorial voice delivers a moving and truthful geopolitical précis: "Everything went wrong all the time, but somehow it didn't matter, while in other countries even if everything went perfectly, life was still a misery." Though he was familiar with the misery of life, Dibdin, in up moods, knew how to enjoy himself. Once commissioned to write a book about wine (he failed to complete it), he was a writer of appetite, his sentences lingering over lip-glistening descriptions of sex and food, although those tastes were indulged in different areas of his fiction. Culinary consumption is generally to be found in the Zen books.

Within 20 pages of Ratking, Zen is eating lamb in a restaurant, despite already having had soup and spaghetti alla carbonara at home, and the banquet reaches a final course in End Games. There might be a case for this book being stamped with one of those new government traffic-light panels, warning of its calorific contents. Indicating the depth of his depression, Zen has for once lost his appetite in the early sections, nauseated by the obsession of Calabrian cooking with the tomato. The American characters, though, are tucking into "ribbons of home-made egg pasta overlaid with chunks of unctuous porcini ... aged ewe's-milk cheese and slabs of Amedi dark chocolate." During the Sherlock Holmes moment in which he deciphers what actually happened in the kidnapping, the detective is treating himself to an alfresco picnic in the mountains, chewing "a sharp sheep's cheese, chunks of crusty wholewheat bread baked in a wood-fired oven". Beyond reflecting the author's own eager and curious palate, the reason for all these meals is that, in Italian culture, food reveals history and regional distinction. Also, Zen, as a depressive whose job unsettles him, eats as a distraction and a comfort.

Interestingly, given the increasingly dominant comparisons between the policeman and a priest, sex seems to play little role in Zen's life. In End Games, for example, the only moment of tumescence occurs through food, when the dining policeman savours "the soft clitoral gristle of the clams". Zen's literary celibacy may have been partly a marketing decision. These books were increasingly targeted at the PD James and Ruth Rendell market, where readers are potentially decorous. Indeed, it is a curious fact that intercourse is more or less outlawed for the investigating figure in British detective fiction. Apart from Wexford, who is married, the other major detectives - Poirot, Marple, Dalgleish, Morse, Rebus, Zen - are all single through all or most of their mysteries. Divorced when the series begins, Zen is permitted occasional relationships and, by End Games, is married to Gemma, a witness in a previous case. But because each of his cases requires travel, he remains alone in his encounters with the reader, enforcing the generic convention that the bringer of justice is monk-like and undistracted. The intervening books outside the series were vacations from such publishing manners, and Dibdin certainly enjoyed them.

The non-Zen novels are erotically inventive and explicit, making full use of the author's post-Chatterley freedom to map the erogenous zones. In The Tryst, a unsatisfyingly married psychiatrist becomes dangerously attracted to an adolescent patient. Dirty Tricks, a brutal comedy of bad behaviour, private and public, during the Thatcher era, begins with adulterous fellatio in the kitchen at a north Oxford dinner party and proceeds to sexual acts rarely described in mainstream fiction. Although Dibdin never formally employed a pseudonym, he seemed to do so psychologically, writing under two quite distinct identities. I have so far been fairly sparing with details of the action of End Games. This is partly, as in any discussion of a crime novel, for fear of spoiling the plot. But in Dibdin's case, there is also a sense, especially in the later Zen novels, that he slightly believed crime novels to be spoiled by the plot. End Games is typical of his late style in being a collage of seemingly unrelated scenes, played out in un-numbered, untitled chapters, the divisions signalled only by space at the base of a page.

Readers will have to decide whether the three narrative strands - the kidnapping, the Revelation movie and a hunt for buried historical treasure - are ever satisfactorily connected, and whether this finally matters, given the intensity of the psychological and geographical detail Dibdin provides. The writer's increasing resistance to the twists and tension traditionally required by the genre may result from the fact that he came slightly reluctantly to the crime shelves. (In this respect, he parallels Ian Rankin, whose first Rebus novel began as a scholarly variation on Jekyll and Hyde in which, in the first draft, Rebus died.) The first two Dibdin novels to be published were erudite exercises in historical pastiche: The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978) sent Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth on the trail of Jack the Ripper, while A Rich Full Death (1986) was a murder mystery set around the household in Florence of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Although critically praised, neither book achieved paperback publication or significant sales until the Zen books broke through; his readers may regret that Dibdin never returned to that strain of literary-historical fiction, except tangentially in the slight and somewhat bitter The Dying of the Light (1993), a parody of the classic English country house crime book, which has the feel of a lawyer's letter warning that critics and readers must never make the mistake of associating him with the genre of Agatha Christie. More than most mystery writers, Dibdin was angered by the extent to which prize committees and literary editors in Britain maintain a distinction between crime books and "literature". As a Booker prize judge in 1992, I tried to make a case for Dibdin's Cabal, but it was dismissed by a don on the panel as "a Vatican travelogue". End Games, though, completes a library that at least competes with the output of many writers who have been given cheques by literary committees. It would have been good to have more books, but this one serves as a culmination of what Michael Dibdin stood for, in writing and in life: place, language and the consolation that worldly pleasure can provide against darker intimations.

To borrow from the ancient language of the nation in which his main fiction was set, and the religion of his troubled but finally decent detective: requiescat in pace. Michael Dibdin's End Games is published by Faber on July 5. To order a copy for £10 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop Rufus Sewell as Italian Detective on ‘Masterpiece Mystery!’ - The New York Times The New York Times Television |A ‘Mystery!’ Series That Has (Gasp!) Actual Sunshine Search A ‘Mystery!’ Series That Has (Gasp!) Actual Sunshine By ELIZABETH JENSEN Photo The British actor Rufus Sewell plays an Italian detective. Credit Left Bank Pictures/"Masterpiece" WHEN it comes to gloomy weather, dark English interiors and brooding loner detectives “Masterpiece Mystery!” on PBS has it covered. So far this season “Masterpiece Mystery!” has offered up Agatha Christie whodunits: three new episodes featuring the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and on Sunday a new adventure for the gentle knitter Miss Marple.

In September the show heads back to another traditional setting, Oxford University, with new episodes of “Inspector Lewis.” Before then, however, the producers decided viewers needed a modern Roman holiday. Beginning next Sunday the series takes a very different turn, with adaptations of three books by the British writer Michael Dibdin, centered on his Italian police detective Aurelio Zen. The soundtrack veers from opera to 1960s-era secret-agent themes. The camera tracks car chases through a lighted-up nighttime Rome and lingers on the Italian countryside. At the center of it all is the actor Rufus Sewell (“Middlemarch,” “The Pillars of the Earth”), more of a heartthrob than the standard “Mystery!” sleuth, sharp suits replacing his usual period dress. While the Zen mysteries follow the formula of crimes that can be solved in 90 minutes, the series’s broader theme is a departure for “Masterpiece” as well, as Zen tries to maneuver his way around corruption in his own department and the government, with conflicting pressure from all sides in the cases at hand.

Continue reading the main story “I rather liked that he’s set up to fail,” said Andy Harries, the chief executive of Left Bank Pictures, which — fresh from adapting Henning Mankell’s “Wallander” mysteries, also shown on “Masterpiece Mystery!” — developed the series for the BBC and “Masterpiece.” “The levels of corruption are so immense, so culturally ingrained in Italy,” he said, referring to the scandals involving the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. “We might regard it as corruption, but the Italians don’t. It’s just a very, very different culture.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The tension “makes for quite a subtle show, with the ambivalence and complexities,” he added. “It was designed to push the boat out further, make the viewer work a little harder.” With “Wallander” and now “Zen,” said Rebecca Eaton, the executive producer of “Masterpiece,” “the way scripts are being written is reflecting a more serious view of life and crime, rather than just a lighthearted escape.” In a late addition to the “Masterpiece Mystery!” schedule Ms. Eaton also just finalized a deal to add a new detective to the lineup for three weeks starting Oct.

16. “Case Histories,” based on the book by Kate Atkinson, will feature a modern detective named Jackson Brodie, played by Jason Isaacs (who will also appear on NBC in the midseason paranormal series “Awake”). As in “Zen,” Ms. Eaton said, the character is a younger man “with sex appeal,” and the setting, Edinburgh, “provides tremendous geographic flavor.” Photo Caterina Murino is Zen's love interest. Credit Left Bank Pictures/"Masterpiece" Publicity materials for “Zen” paint the character as an “honest cop” bringing “justice to modern-day Italy, whether the authorities want it or not.” Mr. Sewell sees it differently. “Always be very much wary of DVD liner notes,” he said in a telephone interview. While not corrupt in the same sense that his colleagues are, he said, Zen “can be quite morally dubious when it suits him.” He added: “He has a slightly lackadaisical moral code, a sense of wanting to do something good. But he’s not above kicking someone when they’re down.

He’s a gray area, and that’s what makes it incredibly fun.” Just shy of 40, Zen is separated from his wife and living with his mother. “There’s a certain lack of dynamism in the character,” Mr. Sewell said. “He’s pushed around by tides and circumstances.” (But just as he always solves his case despite the conflicting pressures, he also ends up with the most sought-after woman in the office, played by an Italian actress, Caterina Murino.) Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy The casting proved a challenge for the producers. With “Wallander,” Mr. Harries explained, it was easy to find British actors who shared the Scandinavians’ pallor; trying to find ones who could play Italians was much harder. Mr. Harries said he had Mr. Sewell in mind for the role from the beginning, because “he has a good Eastern European Mediterranean look about him.” But while the men are almost all English speakers, Italians were largely cast for the female roles, for creative reasons and also because the project had partial Italian financing.

“English girls on the whole simply just don’t have the sensuality and looks of the Italian girls,” Mr. Harries said, quickly adding that “they have different charms.” The result was a mix of accents, something that “the audience was going to buy or not buy,” Mr. Sewell said. “It takes perhaps a little adjustment.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The audience for “Masterpiece” soared in the past season, to an average of 3.5 million viewers, up 66 percent from the 2009-10 season, thanks to “Downton Abbey” and an “Upstairs, Downstairs” sequel. And for the first time since ExxonMobil ended its support in 2004, the financing prospects have brightened, as well. A corporate sponsor, the mutual fund company Franklin Templeton, signed on to support the show from May through September. And a trust established in January to attract individual donors is closing in on its goal of $1 million six months ahead of schedule. For $25,000 each, supporters get their names in the credits, if they wish. “It seems to have hit a sweet spot,” said Ms.

Eaton, adding that the donors clearly have an emotional attachment to the program. Viewers who get too attached to “Zen” may be disappointed, however. While Ms. Eaton said she would love more episodes, Mr. Harries said that because of a change in management at the BBC, “Zen” hasn’t been renewed. Mr. Sewell said he was philosophical about the situation. “There were rumblings in the air that certain people weren’t that fond of the tone and, for me, I think the tone is it.” He said he’d rather go on to other projects “than try to tinker with it.” But Mr. Harries said he hadn’t given up hope that the character could be resurrected. “I’m still working on it,” he said. A version of this article appears in print on July 10, 2011, on Page AR14 of the New York edition with the headline: A ‘Mystery!’ Series That Has (Gasp!) Actual Sunshine. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

Question: Which author writes about the Italian policeman Aurelio Zen?
Answer: Michael DIBDIN